FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Uzbekistan's monuments and public buildings show its past as a Soviet republic. It's now independent, but former Communist boss Islam Karimov still holds a tight rein over this remote central Asian country.What has changed since the early 90s is the practice of Islam -- flourishing once again as it did before the Soviet era. Eighty percent of the nation's 24 million people belong to Uzbekistan's relatively liberal Islamic tradition.
Those traditions were challenged soon after independence, with the advent of Muslim missionaries from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other nations. Shoazim Minavorov is with the government agency that regulates religious activity.
SHOAZIM MINAVOROV (Deputy Religion Minister): Uzbek people have always looked at Islam as peaceful. And it was with great trust that we accepted the foreign religious missionaries in our mosques. But what happened was that these missionaries brought a different brand of Islam which was alien, foreign to our people.DE SAM LAZARO: The newcomers preached conservative ideas, stirring conflict and often violence, particularly in rural areas, according to Marat Zakhidov, a former member of parliament, now a human rights advocate.
MARAT ZAKHIDOV (Human Rights Advocate): People who were not willing to observe certain rules and rituals were boycotted. We saw the first manifestation of this extremism in 1997. I'm talking about assassinations of police and government officials, businessmen in Namangan and other areas.DE SAM LAZARO: But Zakhidov says the government used the unrest as the pretext for widespread arrests of suspected Muslim fundamentalists and anyone else considered a government opponent.
A 1999 U.S. State Department report called Uzbekistan one of the world's most oppressive nations. The government of Islam Karimov has jailed thousands of citizens, ostensibly in a crackdown on terrorist activities. But the report said many of those jailed were hauled in on trumped-up weapons or narcotics charges. Many were guilty of little more than attending services in a mosque.
Marat Zakhidov himself was fired from his job as a university professor and removed from parliament. With international support, he has managed to continue advocating for some of the 5,500 people he says are now detained. Many are tortured to extract confessions on vague charges of extremism.
Mr. ZAKHIDOV: These were the appeals I've had in just the last two weeks. The courts are totally corrupt it is virtually impossible to work with them. They take very unjust, even at times monstrous, decisions about the fate of people.
DE SAM LAZARO: The government defends its response, citing threats from an ill-defined network of terrorist organizations and an assassination attempt on the president in 1998.
Mr. MINAVOROV: There were cases where people, based on fundamentalist feelings, were calling for overthrow of the government, distributing leaflets, incidents of violence in Ferghana. So these people have been justly prosecuted.
ABDUKAYUM AZIMOV (Imam, Al-Bukhari Islamic Institute): We do not need to be preached to about Islam. We are the inheritors of these great scholars. Hanafism is a harmonizing Islam, that takes into account local customs. Women don't cover their faces, for example it's more tolerant.
RAVIL BUKHARAEV (Islam scholar, BBC Russian Radio Service): These radical views flourish and flower in times of trouble, the so-called "gray areas" of history, where nobody understands nothing, except that they had something and now they are destitute.
SERGEI YECHKOV (Journalist): It becomes bad manners if you have not paid a bribe. It has become an inalienable national characteristic of Uzbekistan. It explains the very limited amount of investment and difficulties in relations of Uzbekistan with other countries.
